Autoportrait en apôtre Paul

At fifty-five, Rembrandt cast himself as the Apostle Paul, a sword tucked under his arm and a manuscript in his hands. His furrowed brow catches the light, and he looks out at us as if interrupted mid-thought.

The story behind the painting

Rembrandt signed and dated this canvas Rembrandt.f./1661 near the sitter's left shoulder. It is one of more than forty self-portraits he painted, and it belongs to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Paul had been in his art for a long time: he painted the apostle as early as 1627, thirty-four years earlier, in Saint Paul in Prison, with a long beard and receding hairline. Here the apostle wears Rembrandt's own face instead. The art historian Ernst van de Wetering suggests that he may have worked from earlier self-portraits rather than a mirror, since pose and features resemble older works.

What to look for

Saint Paul is recognisable by the sword under his arm and the manuscript in his hand, his traditional attributes. Van de Wetering believes the work may have been painted wet-on-wet. Compare the rapid strokes in the turban with the thick impasto on the lit forehead, which creates the wrinkles and catches the light. The pages of the book curl slightly at the top and are picked out by light, while its rolled leather stays in shadow. That leather is painted in bluish-grey strokes that stand apart from the otherwise warm brown and beige palette.

Meaning and intent

Showing oneself as a famous historical or religious figure is called a self-portrait historie, a type popular in the 1660s; Rembrandt's other example is his Self-Portrait as Zeuxis. Art historians think the choice to be Paul himself was deliberate, not convenient, since models were easy to find. He may have felt a kinship with the apostle, who was prominent in seventeenth-century Protestant faith. Paul was also a religious teacher, and Rembrandt may have seen a parallel with his own art as a way of explaining scripture.

Legacy

The portrait is counted among the BBC's 100 Great Paintings. It stands apart from Rembrandt's earlier images of the apostle because it looks so much more like his other self-portraits than like a conventional saint. In it, the painter's control of brushwork and of light and dark, from the lit forehead to the shadowed book, gives the figure a strong sense of space. It remains one of the most personal of his late works, a face of the artist and a figure of faith held in the same frame.